Lucy Sharpe is larger than life. Magnetic, addictive. Bold and dangerous. Especially for Margot, who meets Lucy at the end of their freshman year at a liberal arts college in South Carolina. Margot is the shy one, the careful one, always the sidekick and never the center of attention. But when Lucy singles her out at the end of the year, a year Margot spent studying and playing it safe, and asks her to room together, something in Margot can’t say no—something daring, or starved, or maybe even envious.
And so Margot finds herself living in an off-campus house with three other girls, Lucy, the ringleader; Sloane, the sarcastic one; and Nicole, the nice one, the three of them opposites but also deeply intertwined. It’s a year that finds Margot finally coming out of the shell she’s been in since the end of high school, when her best friend Eliza died three weeks after graduation. Margot and Lucy have become the closest of friends, but by the middle of their sophomore year, one of the fraternity boys from the house next door has been brutally murdered… and Lucy Sharpe is missing without a trace.
A tantalizing thriller about the nature of friendship and belonging, about loyalty, envy, and betrayal—another gripping novel from an author quickly becoming the gold standard in psychological suspense.
Book info: 385 pages. Publisher: HarperCollins. Publication Date: 1 Feb 2024
My Thoughts:
Having read a previous book by Stacy Willingham and thoroughly enjoyed it, I was excited to read her latest novel Only If You’re Lucky which was published earlier this year.
One of the main contributing factors for me in any psychological thriller is that feeling of dread, that mounting tension and, of course, that unreliable narrator and Only If You’re Lucky has all that plus more.
Set in South Carolina, Margot has just started University. She’s struggling to fit it and find her place/her tribe and herself because her best friend Eliza tragically died three weeks after graduation and the girls had planned to go to University together and had their whole lives mapped out together.
Eliza was the outgoing one, the bubbly, beautiful and social butterfly and Margot was the quieter, more introverted one who relied on her best friend for everything. Now at University she’s completely adrift and spends the first year quietly in the shadows not really participating in student life.
Lucy Sharpe is in the same campus and she is larger than life, loud, bold and very confident with a magnetic personality which draws everyone to her, and when she approaches Margot and asks her to move in to a house with her 3 friends for their 2nd year, Margot can’t help but agreed despite not knowing Lucy or friends except from afar.
This is where the story takes a dark path, because there is an unexplained death, a missing housemate and so many secrets and lies which start to unfold.
I really enjoyed this book and wasn’t quite sure who, what and why things were happening from the opening page to the twisty reveals which were scattered throughout the story.
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
